COLUMN: Truth Trump spins
No, a voting software problem did not transfer a million votes from Donald Trump to Joe Biden in Pennsylvania. The President tweeted as much. He claims Dominion Voting Systems software, also used in Georgia, caused that error. But there is one problem. The conservative news outlet that first published the story wound up retracting it.
In fact, Dominion only operates in 14 Pennsylvania counties and those counties combined cast 1.3 million votes, with most going to Trump. It would be mathematically impossible for that million vote transfer.
Likewise, in Georgia, 95,801 did not vote for Joe Biden and no one else. There was only about a 43,000 vote gap between the presidential vote and the David Perdue v. Jon Ossoff race. It would therefore be mathematically impossible for 95,801 people to vote in the presidential race for Biden and not any other. The reality is it looks like roughly 95,000 people voted for Joe Biden and then voted for David Perdue. That means Trump will lose Georgia and Perdue will most likely win his runoff.
In Georgia, absentee ballots were not rejected at the same rate they were just two years ago. Republicans believe this is a sign of fraud. Actually, this year the Secretary of State entered a judicial settlement that required the state to only reject absentee ballots lacking a signature. Two years ago, the state rejected ballots that lacked a birth date, address, or signature.
In Arizona, the GOP alleged widespread voter fraud, but wound up asking a judge to investigate just 191 ballots, not enough to overcome an 11,000 vote margin. In Michigan, the GOP has raised a number of challenges, all of which have been dismissed by various courts, including from Republican judges. The margin of victory for Joe Biden in Michigan is over 148,000 votes.
The Trump team has submitted 234 pages of affidavits from just over 100 people attesting to vote fraud in Michigan. But read through those affidavits and you would discover the amount of ballots the affidavits put in doubt is only 1,000 ballots. That is not enough to undermine a 148,000 vote victory for Joe Biden.
In Pennsylvania, the Trump team claimed over 500 absentee ballots were submitted fraudulently. Read the transcript of the court hearing, however, and you would find the President’s lawyer specifically denied the ballots were cast fraudulently. The President’s lawyer merely claimed the absentee ballots failed to meet technical requirements like signatures, though no one disputed that the ballots belonged to actual voters trying to cast lawful votes.
The facts really do matter. The Trump campaign is making a lot of allegations and, as a former elections lawyer, I do believe they have found instances of dead people voting and fraud. The dead are mostly people who cast absentee ballots then died, but their votes got counted. They amount to less than 50 votes cast nationwide. The Trump team claims 10,000 dead people voted in Michigan, but actually those people are all alive. They just had filled out paper voter registration cards and, when those cards were digitized a few years ago, the local boards of election used the year 1900 as their birthdate.
The President is allowed to pursue his claims. There is undoubtedly some fraud. The standard for fraud overturning an election however is that it must amount to a disqualification of ballots equal to the margin of victory plus the number of voters who voted, but did not vote in the presidential race. The President cannot meet that burden. He has lost all but one case thus far filed. Joe Biden is President-Elect.
Erick Erickson is host of the Erick Erickson Show on News-Talk 940 WMAC